Retail trends and technologies – pt. I

We have been hearing about digitization and the impact it might have on value chain for quite some time. But now in addition to theoretical analysis, we also see lot of commercial products and solutions surfacing at retail events which are the significant steps to realize this transitionary phase in retail. We have classified the retail trends and technologies in four parts:

In this post, we’ll discuss two of the four retail trends and technology which stood out at EUROCIS-2019 (Dusseldorf, Germany) and NRF-2019 (New York, USA).
Trend #1: Intelligent retailing
GfK FutureBuy revealed that the agreement for statements like “I am now less loyal to anyone retailer” is growing year after year (4 percentage points in 3 years) especially among Gen Y and Gen Z. With growing paying parity that Gen Y and Gen Z are capable of, this emphasizes the need for the retailer to become smarter and more responsive to the changing customer behavior. What we term as intelligent retailing includes a whole ambit of technologies like Big Data, artificial intelligence, machine learning, new sensor hardware and varied solutions stemming from them.
Dynamic pricing and inventory optimization
These retail trends are designed to enable dynamic pricing, markdown optimization and inventory optimization so that retailers can plan quantity and pricing of their products appropriately. Simply put, cost savings for the retailer. The predictive pricing solutions include usage of daily/weekly/monthly data and uses historical trends and current sales metrics to forecast best pricing scenarios to help the retailer in promotion planning and to determine percentage of discount per product per region. Predictive inventory management and cognitive demand forecasting solutions that were demonstrated a way to optimize the stock and re-order at right junctures to reduce holding cost and unnecessary discounting to clear old stock. Using smarter inventory management tools using analytics